With a mix of ethnography and social theory, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings of responsibility in political, social, and ethical life by showing how neoliberalism's reification of the "responsible subject" masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives.

Introduction. Competing Responsibilities: Reckoning Personal Responsibility, Care for the Other, and the Social Contract in Contemporary Life / Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle  1 Part I. Theoretical Departures 1. Making Us Resilient: Responsible Citizens for Uncertain Times / Nikolas Rose and Filippa Lentzos  27 2. Attunement: Rethinking Responsibility / Jarrett Zigon  49 Part II. States, Companies, and Communities 3. Reciprocal Responsibilities: Struggles over (New and Old) Social Contracts, Environmental Pollution, and Childhood Asthma in the Czech Republic / Susanna Trnka  71 4. Audit Culture and the Politics of Responsibility: Beyond Neoliberal Responsibilization? / Cris Shore  96 5. From Corporate Social Responsibility to Creating Shared Value: Contesting Responsibilization and the Mining Industry / Jessica M. Smith  118 Part III. Violence 6. "The Information Is Out There": Transparency, Responsibility, and the Missing in Cyprus / Elizabeth Anne Davis  135 7. Justice and Its Doubles: Producing Postwar Responsibilities in Sierra Leone / Rosalind Shaw  156 Part IV. Intimate Ties 8. The Politics of Responsibility in HIV / Barry D. Adam  181 9. Responsibilities of the Third Age and the Intimate Politics of Sociality in Poland / Jessica Robbins-Ruszowski  193 10. Genetic Bystanders: Familial Responsibility and the State's Accountability to Veterans of Nuclear Tests / Catherine Trundle  213 References  233 Contributors  263 Index  267

“Competing Responsibilities makes a valuable theoretical and empirical contribution to social scientific understandings of responsibility at a key moment in the world’s unfolding. . . . This is an accomplished collection with a sustained argument running through it, thus offering substantive and always eloquent interpretations of responsibility and creating a text that has broad-ranging value to the academy and indeed, beyond.”

"This volume's concern with responsibility captures a range of facets of neoliberal policies in a focused and novel way. An absorbing and compelling read, Competing Responsibilities makes an original contribution to the continuing delineation of neoliberal policy and practice as the subject and grounding of contemporary anthropological research."